Do you know where this is?

Sunday

May 26, 2013 at 6:00 AMMay 27, 2013 at 4:09 AM

By Melissa McKeon CORRESPONDENT

If history is to be believed, the chain store pictured here from a community outside Worcester can be credited with almost everything we know of as the grocery store experience: checkout lines, rows and rows of groceries to pick from, refrigerated cases, uniformed workers and shopping carts.

Before the Piggly Wiggly chain's founder, Clarence Saunders, decided on this method of providing grocery shopping in 1916, folks went to the store and store personnel picked out the groceries — from behind the counter, mostly.

But Mr. Saunders created the model that has resulted in not just the familiar shopping experience above, but all the marketing it spawned. Once customers were making their own choices from shelves full of different cereals, branding and marketing became important enough for product creators to spend millions to make their box of cereal more distinctive than the next one.

Mr. Saunders started this grocery shopping revolution in Memphis, Tenn., but the idea spread far and wide, as did the chain, Piggly Wiggly. The chain even expanded from its mostly Southern roots to the Northeast, opening here in 1970.

While the Piggly Wiggly chain didn't last in the Northeast, its basic ideas did. Every grocery store and supermarket we know well follows the model started by Clarence Saunders.

Mr. Saunders himself was out of the Piggly Wiggly business barely four years after this supermarket opened. Several grocery store chains took over the extensive Piggly Wiggly chain. C&S Wholesalers owns the Piggly Wiggly brand now.